Conceptual Metaphor Theory As Methodology for Comparative Religion Edward Slingerland

ARTICLES Conceptual Metaphor Theory as Methodology for Comparative Religion Edward Slingerland This article argues for the usefulness of a new methodology for the study of comparative religion, the analysis of conceptual metaphor, as well as for the advantages of the theoretical orientation in which it is grounded, “embodied realism.” The manner in which this methodology and theoretical orientation avoid some of the shortcomings of previous approaches to the study of comparative religion is discussed, with embodied realism being presented as a middle ground between Enlightenment realism and postmodern antirealism. It is argued that commonalities in human bodily experience can serve as a basis for cross-cultural commensurability while still providing room for difference and contingency. Finally, a brief analysis of the human rights debate with China is offered as an illustration of how the methodology of metaphor analysis might actually be applied, as well as its potential role in enabling cross-cultural dialogue on contentious religious issues. THE THEORETICAL PLAUSIBILITY of the comparative religious project is, of course, an issue for those of us who do comparative religion for a living, but it is also—or at least should be—an issue of pressing public Edward Slingerland is an assistant professor of Religion and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90080-0357. Journal of the American Academy of Religion March 2004, Vol. 72, No. 1, pp. 1–31 DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfh002 © 2004 The American Academy of Religion 2 Journal of the American Academy of Religion interest as well. This was forcibly brought home to me recently by an article in the Los Angeles Times about a new phenomenon being observed in mainland China: children taking their parents to court over issues such as negligent upbringing. The tone of the article was for the most part lau- datory, with the subtext being that those backward Chinese were finally learning about the rule of law—discovering the universal, God-given right to sue that Americans hold so dear. Of course, my first thought, as a scholar of early Confucianism, was that Confucius must be spinning cartwheels in his grave. The idea of a child taking his or her parents to court would be so utterly horrifying to him—and, indeed, to any tradition- ally minded Chinese person—as to be almost incomprehensible.1 To begin with, of course, there is the central importance in traditional China of filial piety (xiao) and other hierarchical family relationships, such as “obe- dience to elders” (ti)—literally, “being a good younger brother”—which constitute the basis of human morality and social order.2 Added to this is a distaste for the assertion of what we in the modern West would consider basic legal rights. While recourse to lawyers and lawsuits is viewed by many of us as a crucial means of safeguarding our basic rights against other individuals, corporations, and the government, traditional Confu- cian society views litigation as a pathological symptom of social-moral breakdown.3 What I saw missing in this newspaper account (and, indeed, what seems to be lacking in almost all public discourse in the West concerning China and human rights) is the recognition that modern western liberalism—including the belief in an autonomous individual possessing universal reason and bearing inalienable rights—constitutes a religious worldview, not simply an objective description of reality. I am here following Charles Taylor (1989: 4–8) in understanding “religion” or “spirituality” in the broad sense of any framework of metaphysical claims that provides normative guid- ance, allowing us to make what Taylor terms “strong evaluations”: moral 1 I will, for the moment, follow the convention of equating Confucianism with the traditional Chinese worldview and treating “Confucianism” as a unit rather than a complex and historically quite diverse phenomenon. This assumption will be questioned below. 2 Consider, for instance, Analects 1.2: “A young person who is filial and respectful of his elders rarely becomes the kind of person who is inclined to defy his superiors, and there has never been a case of one who is disinclined to defy his superiors stirring up rebellion. The gentleman applies himself to the roots. ‘Once the roots are firmly established, the Way will grow.’ Might we not say that filial piety and respect for elders constitute the root of Goodness?” 3 Again, consider the reported view of Confucius regarding litigation in Analects 12.13: “In hearing litigation, I suppose I am as good as anyone else, but it would be best to bring it about that there were no litigation at all.” See also the relative weighting of family loyalty versus public law expressed in the famous story of “Upright Gong” in Analects 13.18. Slingerland: Conceptual Metaphor Theory as Methodology for Comparative Religion 3 judgments that go beyond mere expressions of personal preference because they are seen as making ontological claims about the world. This is an important insight, for—as Taylor (1989: chap. 3) and Robert Bellah etal. (especially chap. 1) have argued—many moral debates both within a given culture and between cultures are hampered by a lack of awareness on the part of the participants of the often implicit religious claims on which their posi- tions are based. In the case of the human rights debate with China, most modern western liberals consider their views to be fully “secular” and fail to see that their belief in such things as human rights, rationality, individuality, freedom, separation of church and state, and so on are, in fact, based on an unspoken and mostly unconscious network of metaphysical claims that possesses normative value for them. Although the Founding Fathers of the United States may have viewed the truths of liberalism as self-evident, modern scholars of religion need to be more sophisticated and self-reflective. When we understand modern liberalism as a kind of religion, asking whether or not Chinese “get” human rights or democracy is as inappropriate as asking whether or not they “get” the fact that Jesus Christ is Savior. What we should be asking instead is what the Chinese do believe, how it is different from what we believe, if they can understand our beliefs, and if there is a basis for conversation about it. As long as we fail to see our own religious commitments clearly, real dialogue will be impossible. Taylor makes this point in a piece entitled “Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights”: An obstacle in the path to . mutual understanding comes from the inability of many westerners to see their culture as one among many . To an extent, westerners see their human rights doctrine as arising simply out of the falling away of previous countervailing ideas . that have now been discredited to leave the field free for the preoccupations with human life, freedom, and the avoidance of suffering. To this extent they will tend to think that the path to convergence requires that others too cast off their traditional ideas, that they even reject their religious heritage, and become “unmarked” moderns like us. Only if we in the West can recapture a more adequate view of our own history can we learn to understand the spiritual ideas that have been interwoven in our development and hence be prepared to understand sympathetically the spiritual paths of others toward the converging goal. (1999: 143–144) This job of making both our own and other cultures’ value commitments explicit falls to scholars of comparative religion. This observation that human rights and the ideals of liberalism are products of a particular religious culture has not gone entirely unexpressed in public discourse and has, in fact, served as one of the basic arguments 4 Journal of the American Academy of Religion of Asian governmental bodies in defense of their “failure” to safeguard or respect what the West considers basic human rights.4 This argument has generally been dismissed as self-serving sophism by most in the West, but there are some scholars of comparative religion who have made a genuine attempt to grapple with it. If we want to very roughly classify the vast literature that has grown up around this subject, then we might put in one camp such western scholars of Confucianism as Henry Rosemont Jr. and Roger Ames, who have argued not only that traditional Confucian views of the self are fundamentally incompatible with modern liberal rights talk but that this more “communitarian” Confucian view of the self can help serve as a corrective to some of the excesses of modern western liberalism.5 Another camp agrees with Rosemont and Ames that Confucianism, like traditional religious worldviews in the West, is antithetical to the modern liberal view of the self but argues that this is precisely why East Asia should abandon—and, in fact, gradually is abandoning—its older religious traditions and embracing modernity, democracy, and capitalism.6 Finally, there are those who see in traditional Confucianism precursors to modern liberal ideals such as human rights or popular sovereignty and argue that the Chinese cultural sphere can call on these resources to develop something that looks like a liberal democratic culture, perhaps with a uniquely East Asian quality.7 One issue that is rarely explicitly addressed in these discussions, however, is one that will serve as the primary focus of this article: that of theory and methodology. In other words, how are we to actually go about comparing religious worldviews, and on what basis is such comparison possible? THEORIES AND METHODS IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION We might very roughly classify the theoretical orientations of those who engage in comparative religion by sketching out the two extremes, which I label “Enlightenment realism” and “postmodern antirealism.” The Enlightenment realist stance most closely characterizes the commonsense view of most western nonacademics as well as of those academics working in the natural and social sciences.

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